From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Kwanzaa, in Principle
"I failed," the man who inspired a collectivist holiday acknowledged.
Yesterday was the first day of Kwanzaa, the week-long celebration that is often taken to be a kind of Christmas substitute or parallel December holiday. Of course there is much more to it than that.
Kwanzaa was started in the late 1960s by Maulana (né Ron) Karenga--a California civil-rights activist and now a professor--as a series of days for blacks to reflect on "The Seven Principles," which constitute a credo "by which Black people must live in order to begin to rescue and reconstruct our history and lives." The principles themselves are utility, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which goes by its name in Kiswahili, the major language of the East African country of Tanzania (e.g., umoja, ujima, ujamaa).
Many sources of inspiration have been identified in Mr. Karenga's thinking, most prominently the teachings of Julius Nyerere, the son of a minor chief in rural Tanzania who studied in Britain and returned to his country to lead it to independence in 1961. Nyerere served as Tanzania's charismatic president for the next 23 years.
In 1967, Nyerere announced that ujamaa, often translated as "familyhood," would henceforth be the guiding principle of Tanzanian social and economic policy. He felt that the "relentless pursuit of individual advancement" was not well-suited to African society.
Predictably, Nyerere's version of socialism drove the already low-flying Tanzanian economy into the ground. The forced relocation of 10 million to 12 million peasants into 8,000 "cooperative" government villages (and the razing of their ancestral homes) resulted in badly inefficient land use. The country went from being the largest exporter of food in Africa in 1961 to the greatest importer of food in 1980. Production of sisal, the primary raw-material export in 1960, shriveled to 20% of its peak by the early 1980s. With most of Tanzania's foreign exchange devoted by then to food imports, nothing was left for spare parts for the aging industrial sector or for fuel to get farmers' meager produce to market. It was altogether a disaster.
But you don't have to take my word for it; listen to Nyerere himself. When he stepped down as Tanzania's head of state in 1984, he summed up his tenure in perhaps the five most honest words ever uttered by a world leader: "I failed. Let's admit it."
Nyerere enjoyed something of a renaissance in his last years, winning respect for his personal incorruptibility and for his efforts to end the genocidal war in Rwanda, among other things. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attended his funeral in 1999.
Still, one must ask whether anyone should be encouraged to aspire to principles with such a dismal track record. And Kwanzaa offers precisely such encouragement. The holiday has been criticized for imitating a harvest festival at a time of year when no one in Africa or America harvests; for drawing on East African iconography when most American blacks are descended from West Africa; and for undermining Christmas itself as a holiday worthy of celebration by blacks. But its greatest fault may be the way it offers, in its Seven Principles, a guide to conduct that disparages "individual advancement" in favor of a collectivist illusion.
Nyerere did leave one legacy worth celebrating, though. He united the 120 tribes that live within the borders of his country--borders drawn on a map in a European salon in the 1880s. Tribal rivalries have rent countries all over the African continent, but Tanzanians tend to think of themselves as Tanzanians first and as members of their tribes only secondarily. The Tanzanian census does not ask people to identify their tribe, because that information is not "relevant to the development of the nation," as President Benjamin Mkapa explained in August when urging his citizens to cooperate with census-takers.
Simply stated: There are no hyphenated Tanzanians. This is a principle that all Americans might reflect on this Kwanzaa.
Mr. Hamel is general counsel at Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters.
